APUSH Periods 8–9 — 1945 to the present
The last two periods of the course, and the ones where it is hardest to ask a question without sliding into an argument about the present. These ten are all written in the past tense, attached to a decade, and asked as what a position held and on what grounds. No president after 1989 is named anywhere; nor is any election after 2000, nor any party's present-day position.
Six questions cover 1945 to 1980. An invented 1947 memorandum that declines both to attack and to accommodate, which is containment in three clauses. The 1953 intervention in Iran and what was argued at the time to be at stake. Brown v. Board of Education, asked as what it did and what it did not do — because the Court held one thing in 1954, ordered desegregation the next year "with all deliberate speed", a phrase containing no date, and a decade later most black children in the Deep South were still in segregated schools. Levittown and who the federal mortgage system was willing to lend to. The Great Society and the argument about federal reach it started. And an invented 1972 letter from a man who gave money for the Voting Rights Act and now finds both organised sides against him — which is the realignment of those years in five lines.
Four cover 1980 onward: the supply-side argument, what American foreign policy had to become when the bipolar world ended, the movement of people and industry to the South and West, and the long dispute about what the federal government is for, set out as two positions and left there.
Every source here is invented and says so in its own first line, because everything in these periods is still in copyright. The one exception is a phrase from a Supreme Court opinion, which is a United States government work and free to quote.
Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the AP examinations, and it is not an exam centre.
- Recognise containment from a description of the posture, and distinguish it from massive retaliation, detente and rollback by both content and decade
- State what proponents argued was at stake in a named Cold War intervention outside Europe
- Explain what Brown v. Board of Education held and why the holding and the facts on the ground came apart for a decade
- Say who post-war suburbanisation was open to, and by what mechanism others were excluded
- Describe the constitutional argument the Great Society produced about the reach of federal power
- Explain the realignment of the early 1970s, and why a conservative movement grew alongside rapid social change rather than instead of it
- Set out the supply-side argument of the 1980s and the competing positions on the federal role since then, without treating either as correct
An invented letter to a local newspaper, printed in 1972: 'I gave money for the Voting Rights Act and I will not now be lectured about my own country by people who have never worked a shift in their lives. Somehow both sides have decided I am the enemy.' What does this letter illustrate about American politics in the early 1970s?
Sample question
An invented State Department memorandum of 1947 argues: 'We need neither attack them nor accommodate them. Wherever they push, we should be there already, and stay; in twenty years the pushing will cost them more than they can bear.' Which strategic doctrine does this describe?
- Containment.
- Massive retaliation, which threatened a nuclear response to significant aggression.
- Detente, which sought to lower tension through negotiated agreement.
- Rollback, which aimed at reversing communist control where it already existed.
See the answer
Containment.
Three things in the memorandum settle it: no attack, no accommodation, and a bet that the other side's costs will tell over decades if it is met wherever it moves. That is containment, and it shaped American commitments from the late 1940s onwards. Massive retaliation is a threat rather than a posture, it belongs to the 1950s, and it is about what would happen after an attack rather than about meeting pressure as it appears. Detente is the accommodation the memorandum explicitly declines, and it belongs to the 1970s. Rollback is the attack it declines — and it is the most instructive wrong answer, because it was argued for loudly in public during the 1950s and never became the operating policy, which is a distinction worth being able to make.